


Like a Wave Crashing on a Beach

by notdeadyet



Series: Grins, Coffee, and Recollections [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, One Shot, slow burning partnership really, sort of the process of Falling In Love With Your Partner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 04:03:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8606524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notdeadyet/pseuds/notdeadyet
Summary: Jake fell in love with Amy Santiago like a wave crashing down onto an ocean shore, and it all started with a grin that lit up the room and a cup of not-gross coffee.





	

The first day Jake Peralta met Amy Santiago, he learned five important things in a very particular order:

1\. He finally, finally, was getting a new partner

2\. She had a thing for organization

3\. He would never allow anyone but her to make his coffee every again

4\. She would not be making his coffee everyday 

5\. She was very unintentionally distracting

Jake was a great detective. It didn’t take him long to figure these five things out, based on obvious and slightly annoying indisputable evidence. Really, the first three were made in the first five minutes of her existence in his life.

1\. She wasn’t quite worthy of a complete introduction on her first day. Everyone, at that time, was out making arrests and fighting crime, so when Jake came in late that morning, she was the only one in the precinct and seemed completely fine with that. Her stuff was hung over her chair at the desk across from him, where his old partner, a 60-year-old man that was recently transferred to desk duty across the city, used to sit. So, it took him ten seconds to discover that he had a new partner. 

2\. Her desk was neater than any he had ever seen before. And not just in that I-have-never-worked-here-yet-so-everything-is-in-its-proper-place-and-will-be-in-disarray-by-Wednesday kind of way. There were shelves and filing systems and binders and it was the most intimidating thing Jake had ever see in his life, and Jake was a cop.

3\. She gave him a huge smile when she first saw him. It was the kind of smile that lit up a room without trying, the kind that made anyone’s heart skip a beat. Jake was not used to big, bright grins around the precinct. Rosa was stoic and Boyle was the kind of guy that was cheerful without being an obnoxious ray of sunshine (with a few exceptions) and Terry was kind of like a friendly uncle that smiled often, but wasn’t really into grins. Everyone else Jake just rarely talked to. But, come on, who could blame him? He was 26, he was working in this precinct for over a year already, and he never went on the field with anyone else. Besides, why would he ever go out of his way to talk to Scully or Hitchcock when there were people like Rosa and Charles four feet to the left?

“Hello! I’m Amy, Amy Santiago, and you must be Jake Peralta. Captain McGinley said you would, er, probably be in within the next hour or so, so it must be you! Captain also said we were going to be partners, and I’m personally very excited to get started. Oh! I made you a coffee, too!” She said this all very fast before Jake even had the chance to open his mouth. Taking the cup of coffee warily, he held it and looked at her closely. She was young – younger than him by a few years, probably. Over-eager. Probably just out of the academy. Jake wondered where this was going to go.

“Yeah, that’s me. Er – sorry to keep you waiting.” For lack of anything else to do, Jake took a sip of his coffee, which was a beverage he usually hated. Somehow, though, this tasted nothing like coffee. It was just… sugar, really. It was fantastic. Glancing at his desk, he saw various candy wrappers and a few open bags of gummy worms littering the surface. At least she was a decent detective, for a rookie. “Thanks for the coffee. It’s pretty good.”

“Oh, it’s no problem.” Something was calculating in her gaze, though, and Jake realized with slight surprise that this entire interaction was an experiment. She was testing the waters, finding out what made him tick. Amy Santiago was in complete control of the situation and he hadn’t even realized. By now, if she was a good enough detective, she would be well aware that Jake was frequently late, he was obsessed with sugar, he was probably old enough to know better, and considering there was a cream cheese stain on his shirt, right beside the orange soda stain, he was not a neat-freak by any means. Basically, they had both figured out that they were polar opposites within a fifteen second interaction.

“So… new transfer, huh? I didn’t know I was getting a new partner today.” Jake said, leaning against his desk.

“Oh, this was very sudden. I was working as a beat cop in the nine-two on Friday and they offered me a transfer just two days ago.”

Yep. Over-eager. It was slightly endearing.

Their conversation was very tentative and one dimensional, both testing each other without revealing too much about themselves. It was a game of chess, really, and Jake sucked at chess. 

“So, can I expect this kind of royalty treatment every day?” Jake asked with a grin, and he could see something click in her mind.

“Far from it, Peralta. You can make your own sugar water.” She said with an eye roll, and Jake relaxed. At least they were starting to understand each other.

By the end of the day, after she had gone through three of his open cases and pointed out seven pieces of evidence he had missed, Jake could safely say he understood about 60% of what she had said. Most of his attention for the last nine hours was focused on how shiny her hair was, how her eyebrows creased when she was concentrating, and her weirdly adorable shyness when she met the others as they came in.

Basically, from day one, some part of Jake Peralta knew he was fucked. 

-

By the time they were partnered for a year, Jake understood a few more things about Amy Santiago. 

1\. She could be weirdly over confident at times that seemed to fuel a sense of determination in her to be the absolute best she could be. Jake figured this stemmed from her seven brothers.

2\. She had the best reactions when he bothered her. The. Best. That may have been mostly because there was no one else to bother, necessarily. Rosa kind of scared him and Charles was basically his best friend while Amy was… a weird kind of desk creature that had nice smiles and good ideas and a weirdly appropriate sense of humour and a bland taste in men. She got exasperated in a sort of way that had a hint of a smile behind it. Jake probably should have realized that for the next seven years, endearing would be his favourite way to describe his partner. Not that he would ever tell anyone. 

They were great partners, though. Something about them just… worked. As though their opposite personalities and points of view managed to meet in the middle instead clash like two offending waves. She was good and he was good and they were great together. 

In a completely, totally, cop-friendly way. Sure, he jokingly flirted with her, and her attention was his number one priority, and sometimes he may very deliberately crash her dates, but they were just friends. That’s it. That’s all they needed to be. No room for anything else.

-

That mindset lasted for about five years. It was a kind of slow burn as everything started to come crashing down around him and she was right there, like a weird beacon. It was little things that kept gathering speed and snowballing together until there was an absolute standstill and she was all that was left. Sure, he had it bad when she started dating Teddy, and kept dating Teddy, and then dating Teddy wasn’t a thing anymore but he was dating Sophia and thinking about Amy way too much. 

In fact, Jake was pretty sure, looking back, that the reason he was so cut up when Sophia broke it off was because he would be allowed to go after Amy and there was 0 proof anymore that she was into him. Sophia was great, for sure. But deep down, he knew they weren’t going to last. Sophia was just the first one to admit it.

-

Jake fell in love with Amy like a wave crashing down onto an ocean shore. It started as a small, almost unnoticeable bump in the otherwise smooth partnership – something that was invisible to anyone not looking for it. It grew slowly but surely, building up strength and momentum and size until everyone except those with their backs turned away could see it. Then it all paused before crashing down at once, engulfing everything in front of it and leaving nothing out of its wake. 

If Jake’s process of Falling In Love With His Partner was like a wave, than Amy’s was like the beach it crashed onto. Dry and clean and ignoring the way that the sand at the water’s edge was pulling back into the ocean until the wall of water was impossible to miss. Once Amy let herself get wet (not in the sexual sense) (maybe in the sexual sense) (this metaphor was for the romantic sense, though), she was not going to be able to dry off, because waves would keep crashing down until all the sand that once made up the beach was swept into the ocean and spat back out. Jake was almost positive she fell in love with him when she knew that he was already far too in love with her.

-

If Jake was to go back in time to his 27-year-old self and tell him that one day he would kiss Amy Santiago in a restaurant to keep their cover, he probably would have gotten a high five. I mean, come on, his 27-year-old self was at least mature enough to admit that making out with Amy would probably be pretty good. 

If Jake proceeded to tell his 27-year-old self that a few hours later they would make out again, he would assume it would be a one-night casual fling. Incorrectly, of course, and suppressing the fact that his 27-year-old self wouldn’t want it to be just a fling at all.

His 27-year-old self would definitely not believe that eventually Amy Santiago would be smiling at him on a senior’s cruise after the Pontiac Bandit escaped again before saying with absolute, unwavering certainty “I love you.”

However, his 27-year-old self may believe that he loved her right back. Because, seriously, who couldn’t love Amy Santiago?

Despite all of these skepticism's his 27-year-old self may have, the Jake currently watching Amy scoop heaping tablespoons of sugar knew he would probably be pretty pleased to know that, one day, Amy Santiago would start to make him coffee every day.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm making this part of a collection, mostly because I have the plot for a follow up story in my head and I don't think this one-shot should become chaptered. 
> 
> I hope you like it! I have two other fics for this pairing as well, and I'm always a slut for comments. Thanks for reading!
> 
> (guess who has four papers to get back to)


End file.
